Oh My God, It Happened Again
A historic Dwars door Vlaanderen, and a look ahead at the Tour of Flanders
I’ll just be transparent here: I overslept on Wednesday and did not watch Dwars door Vlaanderen live. Dwars door Vlaanderen is one of the Flemish cobbled classics subsidiary to Ronde van Vlaanderen itself, and sometimes I get it confused with Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. It’s a big deal—it’s a World Tour race, after all—but there are race days you set an alarm for and race days where you can catch up later.
So when I got around to checking the results, I was thrilled to see American Neilson Powless at the top of the podium. Powless is one of my guys, a versatile and fairly softspoken American who’s challenged for everything in his career but won relatively little.
Powless has gotten into the top 10 at every monument except Paris-Roubaix, plus the UAE Tour, Tour de Suisse, Paris-Nice, and the world road race championship in 2021 on a bumpy Belgian parcours. He came within seconds of wearing the Tour de France yellow jersey in 2022, when he came to the finish with the leaders on a cobbled Paris Roubaix-Lite Stage 5.
In 2023, Powless launched an assault on the polka dot jersey at the Tour de France, an ambition that suits his stamina and versatility. But he went too hard early in the race and gassed in the final week. After an injury-plagued 2024, which looked like a writeoff until he won two races in the last 11 days of the season, I wasn’t that high on Powless coming into 2025.
Still, he’s won a couple pretty big classics races, and he finished third at Dwars door Vlaanderen in 2023, so while I was pleasantly surprised to see him win, I was not bowled over wish shock. Until I saw the rest of the top five: Wout van Aert, same time; Tiesj Benoot, same time; Matteo Jorgenson, + 5 seconds; Mads Pedersen, +45 seconds.
“Holy shit,” I thought. “Did it happen again?”
“It,” in this case, is 2015 Omloop Het Niewsblad.
Ian Stannard of Team Sky found himself, like a lost dog in a herd of cows, amidst a three-man Etixx-Quick Step break in the last five kilometers of the race. It’s basically unheard-of for a team to force a three-on-one break in a classics race, but it can be done, and the rewards are immense.
With a 3-on-1 advantage, the team with more riders can roll attacks, forcing their lone enemy to expend energy with each acceleration, eventually wearing him down and breaking him. If by some miracle that doesn’t work, the team with the numerical advantage can set up a sprint for their team leader and probably win on the line anyway.
In 2015, Etixx-Quick Step1 was King Shit of the Classics. They had peak Mark Cavendish, a very young Michał Kwiatkowski, an even younger Julian Alaphilippe, and all-time classic legend Tom Boonen. They won 54 races that year.
But they fucked up at Omloop. Boonen and Niki Terpstra rolled attacks, but Stannard had been drafting for half an hour before the finale and had the freshest legs. He closed every one without panicking. He also got some help from the third Quick Step rider, Stijn Vandenbergh, who made a couple subtle but inexplicable and ultimately fatal tactical booboos that helped keep Stannard in the race. In the end, it was Stannard who dropped Vandenbergh, then Boonen, and then outsprinted Terpstra to win.
This is a legendary result because of how rarely this situation arises, and how even more rarely, within those precious few cases, the guy in Stannard’s position comes out on top. People still talk about it all the time.
As I imagine they’ll be talking about 2025 Dwars Door Vlaanderen for years to come.
Every team out there knows what an overpowering position a multi-rider break is, but forcing it is a different proposition. It takes unbelievable power, and the element of surprise, and a depth in rider strength that most teams could not even contemplate having.
Visma-Lease a Bike can do it…maybe not whenever they want, but they’ve managed to systematize it.2
There’s a lot of gossip in NFL circles right now about the Tush Push. For those of you who subscribe to this newsletter but have an aversion to watching athletes who weigh more than 160 pounds, the tush push is a modified quarterback sneak technique perfected in the past few years by the Philadelphia Eagles.
A normal quarterback sneak involves the quarterback taking the ball and squirming through a gap in the line to gain a few inches. It requires coordination and strong offensive line play, but it’s not a superhuman athletic feat as such. One of the all-time masters of the QB sneak was actually Tom Brady, a skinny old guy who would’ve turned to chalk if he’d been asked to run a read option play. By the end of Brady’s career, he was one of the slowest players in football history and his body was 80 percent cheek filler by volume, but he could take the snap and lean through a gap better than any man alive.
The Eagles do…not that. They have one of the strongest and best-coached offensive lines in the league, made up end to end of Pro Bowlers, with (until this past season) a Hall of Fame center and a possible Hall of Fame right tackle. They also have quarterback Jalen Hurts, who is only 6-foot-1, 220 pounds, but was a regionally ranked powerlifter in high school. He squats 600 pounds.3
So with this killer line and Hurts, and the rest of the team lined up behind the pile and pushing, the Eagles figured out they could get a yard, sometimes two, whenever they wanted, even when the opponent knew it was coming. After a year of this, their success rate went down, and they had to develop counters, but 3rd-and-2 or less is basically automatic now. That allows them to go for it on fourth down more, punt less, keep the ball and score more, sleep better, and have healthier, clearer skin.
Crucially: No other team has been able to replicate the Eagles’ success. So instead of catching up, numerous other teams (and reportedly NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell) want to ban it.
Football people are so fucking soft, man. It’s not against the rules to hit the weight room.
That was a long digression, and I apologize, but: Go Birds.
The cycling version of the tush push is Visma-Lease a Bike’s multi-rider raid. If they don’t like how the race is going, the boys in yellow—the team being made up entirely of riders with big engines who are otherwise hosslike—get on the front line astern and floor it, like they’re trying to up the tempo.
Then the last Visma-Lease a Bike rider lets the wheel go. He slows down ever so gently, allowing the rider ahead of him to open a gap. That gives the attacking trio just enough of a head start to make the team time trial move stick.
In any normal circumstance, the peloton could bring that breakaway group back. But on Wednesday, it was Dylan van Baarle who let four teammates slip away, and it matters who those four teammates are:
Wout van Aert: serial classics winner and serial monument runner-up, two-time world time trial silver medalist and 2024 Olympic time trial bronze medalist
Edoardo Affini: 6-foot-4 man-beast, 2024 world time trial bronze medalist and European time trial champion. Filippo Ganna was born 15 miles from the Swiss border; if he’d been born 15 miles on the other side of the border, Affini would have a cabinet full of Italian ITT gold medals as well
Tiesj Benoot: Veteran classics rider, 2020 Paris-Nice runner-up, winner of Strade Bianche in 2018 and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne in 2023
Matteo Jorgenson: Lanky redheaded American icon, master of all terrain
That’s the cycling equivalent of Jalen Hurts, Jordan Mailata, Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens. Those four guys can ride anyone off their wheel, and once they’re away they can work together to keep the peloton behind more or less indefinitely.
When Visma-Lease a Bike attacked with 71 kilometers to go, Powless was way up the road in a strong break that included gigantic English time trialist Josh Tarling, three-time U23 world time trial champion4 Mikkel Bjerg, and Danish road race champion Rasmus Pedersen.
Affini was spent quickly and dropped, but his teammates closed a 30-second gap to the break in less than two kilometers. In another 15 kilometers, the Visma-Lease a Bike trio had dropped everyone but Powless and opened a 30-second lead on the peloton.
Unlike Etixx-Quick Step in 2015, van Aert and his buddies had a little bit of breathing room to the group behind. Pedersen, who’s in the form of his life, launched an attack with about 20 kilometers to go but didn’t make much headway because—and remember, this is the whole point—no single rider on Earth is faster than van Aert and two other Visma-Lease a Bike riders working together.
Last year at Omloop, Jorgenson, van Aert, and Jan Tratnik rolled attacks on a group about 12 riders until Tratnik finally got off the leash and made good his escape. Surely Jorgenson and Benoot could do the same to Powless. If they failed, it would’ve come down to a 1-on-1 sprint between a hybrid puncheur-climber type guy5 and a guy with legit top-end sprinter speed.
Instead, they decided to keep rolling turns and come to the line together, banking on van Aert’s superior sprint to make short work of Powless.
And to be clear, it should’ve worked. Visma-Lease a Bike got a lot of crap after the race for blowing it from a position that, I’d argue, was substantially more favorable than the one Etixx-Quick Step got a decade’s worth of shit for fumbling a decade ago.
They set it up perfectly, and van Aert kicked with about 200 meters to go on the flat, straight run to the finish. He converts that sprint against Powless probably 99 times out of 100, but this time the fastest man in the group by miles cramped up, and Powless slipped past.
Look at poor Jorgenson hanging his head in the background. It’s like the opposite of the Lawson Craddock celebration frame after Magnus Cort won Stage 19 of the 2021 Vuelta after Craddock turned himself inside-out to make the break and the sprint work. If you could surrender cobra without taking your hands off the handlebars, this is what it would look like.
This glorious little American escapade comes at a weird time for Visma-Lease a Bike and van Aert, because Ronde van Vlaanderen is on Sunday. Van Aert and Visma-LAB have made a bunch of weird tactical mistakes over the past couple years, and with van Aert turning 31 this year, the pressure to finally get one over on Mathieu van der Poel is mounting.
The Tour of Flanders is one of the best all-around tests of climbing, sprinting, bike-handling, flat-ground power and tactics that you’ll find on the entire calendar. And it would’ve been hard enough to win if Visma-Lease a Bike had come to the line on Wednesday with van Aert at the head of a podium sweep. It’ll be all the more so now after this eclipse of the soul.
Van Aert will have Benoot, Jorgenson, and Affini with him on Sunday, but Powless will be back. Ineos will have Tarling and Magnus Sheffield, whose 25th-place finish at DDV was his first outside the top 10 since the Surf Coast Classic in January. Mads Pedersen just won Gent-Wevelgem by almost a minute; if he’s ever going to break into the van der Poel-van Aert stratosphere it’s now.
But I worry it’s all academic, because for the second monument in a row, we’re going to get Tadej Pogačar vs. van der Poel: The best cyclist of all time vs. the only rider with enough bovine brute strength to make him sweat. I would love, absolutely love, to see a varied tactical battle that leverages Visma-Lease a Bike’s depth against the individual brilliance of its rivals, perhaps resulting in an unexpected winner. But I suspect it’ll be the same two dudes beating each other with lead pipes from 80 kilometers out again.
Perhaps the women will provide something more surprising. The favorite must still be the SD Worx duo of Lottle Kopecky and Lorena Wiebes, but Elisa Longo Borghini just won the women’s Dwars Door Vlaanderen with a 25 kilometer solo break, and she’s the defending champ.
Visma-Lease a Bike is leaving Pauline Ferrand-Prévot home as the interdisciplinary champ gears up for Ardennes Week, but Marianne Vos will have Fem van Empel on her wing, in sort of a Looper situation. I’m waiting for Chloe Dygert to really make an impact on one of these classics races, and as a late entrant she might here, either for her own ambitions or in support of Kasia Niewiadoma.
But Puck Pieterse is due. She finished 36th in her debut professional road race, Omloop van Het Hageland, in 2023. Since then she hasn’t finished lower than 13th in 18 race starts, including last year’s Tour de France Femmes GC. She’s started seven one-day races this season and finished in the top 10 in all of them. If you don’t count the world road race championship, she’s finished in the top 10 in every one-day race she’s started in the past 13 months.
She’s due.
I was going to end on how you could watch De Ronde in the U.S., but because it’s a Flanders Classics-organized event it’s on FloSports, and if you have FloSports you already know how to watch it.
Now Soudal-Quick Step
Cf. 2022 Paris-Nice Stage 1, 2022 E3 Saxo Bank Classic, 2023 Gent-Wevelgem, et al.
He’s also the reigning Super Bowl MVP. Don’t skip leg day.
And Tadej Pogačar’s personal litter-bearer
I dunno, Powless is kind of hard to classify
Loved reading this, thanks. I’m all for a Puck win, I feel like that would be widely celebrated. WvA (or Visma in general) winning would be great just so we can stop constantly hearing about the pressure of the Belgian press.